r if he
saw a girl really trying, or more patient with well meaning stupidity,
but some things fretted him, and he was as apt to correct a girl in her
grammar as in her table service. Out of work hours, if he met any of
them, he recognized them with deferential politeness; but he shunned
occasions of encounter with them as distinctly as he avoided the ladies
among the hotel guests. Some of the table girls pitied his loneliness,
and once they proposed that he should read to them on the back piazza in
the leisure of their mid-afternoons. He said that he had to keep up with
his studies in all the time he could get; he treated their request with
grave civility, but they felt his refusal to be final.

He was seen very little about the house outside of his own place and
function, and he was scarcely known to consort with anyone but Fane, who
celebrated his high sense of the honor to the lady-guests; but if any of
these would have been willing to show Gregory that they considered his
work to get an education as something that redeemed itself from discredit
through the nobility of its object, he gave them no chance to do so.

The afternoon following their talk about Clementina, Gregory looked in
for Fane behind the letter boxes, but did not find him, and the girl
herself came round from the front to say that he was out buying, but
would be back now, very soon; it was occasionally the clerk's business to
forage among the farmers for the lighter supplies, such as eggs, and
butter, and poultry, and this was the buying that Clementina meant. "Very
well, I'll wait here for him a little while," Gregory answered.

"So do," said Clementina, in a formula which she thought polite; but she
saw the frown with which Gregory took a Greek book from his pocket, and
she hurried round in front of the boxes again, wondering how she could
have displeased him. She put her face in sight a moment to explain, "I
have got to be here and give out the lettas till Mr. Fane gets back," and
then withdrew it. He tried to lose himself in his book, but her tender
voice spoke from time to time beyond the boxes, and Gregory kept
listening for Clementina to say, "No'm, there a'n't. Perhaps, the'e'll be
something the next mail," and "Yes'm, he'e's one, and I guess this paper
is for some of youa folks, too."

Gregory shut his book with a sudden bang at last and jumped to his feet,
to go away.

The girl came running round the corner of the boxes. "Oh! I thought